Module 1 - HTML Basics

Module 1 - Introduction to the World Wide Web and Web Site Design

HTML Basics

HTML is shorthand for Hypertext Markup Language. This is the code that creates a web page. An HTML file contains “tags” that tell the web browser how to assemble the web page. For example, if I had a line of HTML code that looks like this

Quick Exercise: Viewing the HTML Source Code

Open Internet Explorer
Navigate to http://www.google.com
On the Internet Explorer menu bar, click on “View,” and then “Source.” A window will open that shows you the source code for the web page you are viewing.

Now that you know how to view the source HTML code, take a look at several of your favorite web sites and look at the source code – see if you can identify some of the basic tags in the source code for the page. You don’t need to understand much at this point, just take a curious look.

Fortunately, you do not need to write your web pages using these tags (though you can if you know the HTML coding language). In this course, we will use a web authoring application to help us create the web pages – Netscape Composer. Using Composer, we will lay out the web pages very much like using a word processing program, and then Composer will write the HTML code for us.

Additional Resources about HTML code:

UMW Instructional Technology Specialist Andy Rush has created a very simple tutorial on HTML basics: http://www.umw.edu/training/inte/internet/basics/index.htm
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications had one of the first (and still one of the best) in depth HTML primer. You can see it here: http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/General/Internet/WWW/HTMLPrimer.html

Creating Research-Based Web Sites with Netscape Composer

Module 1 - Introduction to the World Wide Web and Web Site Design

HTML Basics

Module 1 Topics